Author: Tom Reimann

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Doom Infernal Sky🌭

You could not do more to convince me that you have never played one second of a DOOM game than to write the four DOOM novels that were published in the 1990s. Alleged science fiction writers and probable shave club subscribers Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Lineweaver sat down and pounded out roughly 600 adult-length pages of hastily-researched fanfiction to trick their friends into thinking they knew everything about a game they weren’t allowed to play, and the end result is the worst crime to have ever been committed with a home computer.

I’m not going to spend much time recapping the first two books in the series, because I did that already. You can get a refresher in article, t-shirt, or coffee mug form. But if for some reason you want to start here with Part 3 like some kind of maniac, like the most grounded juggalo on the field trip, all you really need to know is that Book 1 was weirdly horny, and Book 2 was weirdly horny AND full of Mormon propaganda. Book 3 is horny, Mormon, and, uh, pretty racist. But mostly horny.

You cannot find a physical copy of this book, except in the ransom demands of several anonymous perverts on eBay. It’s only available in digital format, because incriminating evidence deletes more quickly than it burns. I’d long since thrown my copy away so I had to spend six new dollars on the digital version. I’m collecting that fee from each and every one of you at the moment of my death.

For a 13-year-old nerd in 1996, reading DOOM: Infernal Sky was like getting a Playboy subscription from your mom – theoretically this is what I wanted, but I don’t appreciate the gesture, and it’s not what I wanted at all. You see, for authors Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Lineweaver, the DOOM series was a unique opportunity to tuck thousands of words of far-right conspiracy theories into a story that’s SUPPOSED to be about demons getting their assholes ripped out by a rabid space marine who is deathless to the point of insanity. The amount of monster-slaying exponentially decreases from book to book to make room for these rambling monologues so that by Infernal Sky, we only see one cyberdemon, and he’s asleep. Probably because Doomguy won’t stop talking about Jesus. Nobody should be asleep in DOOM. Least of all me.

The subtext of these rants flew straight over my seventh-grade head like a copy of DOOM: Infernal Sky yeeting itself out of an occult bookstore and back into the Faith and Spirituality section at Border’s, where it belongs. At the time, I just thought this book was bad, which it is, but that’s not a strong enough word. That’s like calling Ted Bundy a law student. The internet was two tin cans and a string back in 1996, so if I wanted to look up any of the references the authors tucked into their DOOM story I’d have to heave my ass to the library, and there were simply too many Goosebumps books and Mortals Kombat in my room for me to leave the house for all that. But today, with 30 years of ghosts fueling the new internet, I don’t have to go ANYWHERE. (That’s how the internet works, look it up. On the internet.) So I can finally tell you that DOOM: Infernal Sky is not merely bad. It’s a recruiting tool for white supremacists.

The book opens with Doomguy, AKA Flynn “Fly” Taggart because the authors named him after their Shadowrun characters, relaxing hornily on a beach with his best friend Arlene:

Arlene is hot and knows everything about obscure science fiction and pulp horror, but constantly needs to be put in her place by men, because this book was written by TWO geeks. There are no demons anywhere in sight for the first 50 pages, and after that they don’t show back up for another 100 pages, like the A24 version of DOOM where everybody leaves the theater angry. Technically there are no demons in this story at ALL, because the authors take several hundred words, directly up front, to reassure us that the “demons” are just evil aliens PRETENDING to be demons, to scare humans. This is integral to their plans for world domination, because the authors are frightened of demons. At many points in the novel they seem to be trying to convince themselves that demons aren’t real.

“Sweetie, if it were a REAL demon, would it need a rocket launcher? Of course not. Go to sleep, Dafydd. I mean David.” Anyway, I lied to you. That’s how the book really begins. In case you thought we were going to get one full page into this DOOM novel without quizzing us on scripture, you were dead wrong. This prologue ends with a woman and child in Demon-Occupied France quoting the Chad Kroeger song from Spider-Man, five years before Spider-Man was released. This means Chad Kroeger has read DOOM: Infernal Sky and it stuck with him. Ok, back to the nudity.

We get our first naked boobs five paragraphs into Chapter 1. Arlene Sanders, the spilled Shasta bottle to the divining rod that is Doomguy’s penis, points her breasts boobily at the horizon like a sextant, because the authors saw the first three letters of that word and stopped reading. Doomguy tries to calm his raging erection by carefully sipping whiskey, which the authors continually refer to as Jack Daniel’s. The only people who call Jack Daniel’s “Jack Daniel’s” are people who do all their drinking at home, far away from other people.

Doomguy goes on to assure us that normally he would never drink or do drugs while trying to send Arlene telepathic dick pics. He painstakingly describes her body like create-a-character prompts fed into ChatGPT by a corpse defiler. Then he immediately insists that Arlene is doing the same, so no big deal! It’s not weird AT ALL. He and Arlene have been relaxing on the beach since the last novel, which ended in a cliffhanger. As Arlene points her tits around like she failed the gun safety class with the fewest working lights in the strip mall and Doomguy psychically edges himself into the abyss, a character we never see again begs our heroes to tell him how the last book ended. This goes on for five chapters. But not before the action comes to a complete stop for the characters to share their conspiracy theories about Pearl Harbor, while the authors admit how stupid it is to name a character after the base’s historic commander.

Doomguy loves quizzing Arlene, because this book was written by two geeks. He himself is such a mega nerd for America he prays to freedom every Independence Day:

What kind of utter psychopath reads the Declaration of Independence out loud? The Doomguy, that’s who! Speaking of utter psychopaths, Fly and Arlene constantly wrestle with his supernatural horniness as it tries to conquer their minds. Fly talks about her like a decorated sex veteran with hundreds of confirmed nut-bustings, but Arlene ALSO navigates sexuality like three homeschooled kids in a trenchcoat trying to buy condoms.

I guess in DOOM you’d call it fragging a nut. Anyway, onto the white supremacy!

J. Neil Schulman was a right-wing fig-juggler who wrote The Rainbow Cadenza, about a libertarian utopia wherein gay marriage is legal and the president is a lady, but women are required to perform three years of sexual servitude and clones are hunted for sport, because such is the price of Woke. More importantly, the book Fly discovers, Stopping POWER, is a rambling treatise explaining how there wouldn’t BE any violent crime in America if HYSTERICAL anti-gun PUSSIES would just shut up and OWN GUNS ALREADY:

He quotes Hitler and immediately brags about quoting Hitler to his liberal Jewish relatives after they saw Schindler’s List (see “right-wing psychopath,” above), and this is all in the book’s preface.

You stalwart Hotdoggers who have been following this series of articles already know how the authors of DOOM: Infernal Sky feel about bringing up Hitler and the Holocaust in their novels about a monster-killing game for children – they absolutely love it. They go hog wild with it. They can’t get enough. The J. Neil Schulman sack of quackery fits neatly on their bookshelf, is what I’m getting at.

Remember kids, “the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened if the Jews had guns” is a notorious white supremacist talking point!

And no DOOM novel would be complete without at least one weird scene of Fly trying to strangle his statutory lust to death:

Important context: Jill is fourteen.

Doomguy sincerely cannot WAIT to fuck Jill. Luckily, he’s too honorable to have sex with the teenager and tells her she’s too young to be thinking about such things.

I wonder if the authors are making an obtuse reference to rules about adults leering at minors in YA fiction. Either way, Doomguy releases his throbbing frustration in a furiously nude swim, during which he cums so hard over Arlene’s feet he scalds his dickhole with salt water.

He would go to war and die to protect those gorgeous hooves. Also I guess he drank his cum. Meanwhile, Jill starts hanging out with Dr. Ackerman, a character who is described as looking exactly like Vincent Price because the authors have no imagination. That corner of their brains died from oxygen deprivation after years of excessive gooning. The authors accidentally make him an arch pervert, because you also depend on imagination to conceal evidence of your many crimes.

Ackerman tries to impress Jill with random geek trivia, which is the same way Fly interacts with Arlene, because quizzing women is the universal love language (see “written by two geeks,” above).

Mercifully Ackerman is decapitated almost as soon as he is introduced, and we never have to pursue this uncomfortable line of horniness any further. There are plenty of OTHER lines of uncomfortable horniness for us to follow. For example, Doomguy’s other sidekick is a devout Mormon named Albert who regularly lapses into alarming monologues about how Arlene should be making babies instead of fighting demons.

The authors LOVE Albert. They’re constantly writing him clever ways to out-logic Arlene and tell her to shut up. Plus, he was a sniper in the Marines, AND in the CIA, where he killed drug dealers, just like Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon movies. And he totally COULD be crushing SO MUCH ASS, you guys:

See? It doesn’t even MATTER that he’s never had sex before, because he’s a Mormon, and Mormons aren’t ALLOWED to. But women are throwing so much sex at him all the time that he COULD have sex any time he wanted, he just doesn’t respect THOSE women. Because THOSE women can’t answer trivia questions about the Book of Mormon. Then we take a break for some good old fashioned 90s racism.

Also, the authors continue their undefeated streak of sexualizing every female character including the dead ones, which is a phrase here meaning “especially the dead ones”, because there have only been two living female characters in this saga thus far. But in case you were worried the authors are misogynists, fear not – Arlene has special lady powers that allow her to detect female zombies by their drab appearance.

It doesn’t take them much longer to bring up Hitler and the Holocaust again! But don’t worry, this time they do it by equating him to Malcolm X.

Also, the human computer character Ken, whom we allegedly met in the previous novel although I have no memory of that and his existence here feels like a savage lie, reveals that the human defenders of Earth plan to construct a socialist utopia after the aliens who are definitely not demons but aliens pretending to be demons are defeated. We’re given exactly zero details about this vile New Eugenics plan, except that it MIGHT involve cyborgs and ALMOST CERTAINLY involves eugenics, probably.

But it would all be the fault of conniving, villainous socialists who want to strip away individuality. It sounds a lot like the dystopia from The Rainbow Cadenza, only painted in much broader strokes, because the authors are bad at the job they have been paid to do. The child inside of them who fueled their imaginations was gooned to death in the darkest corner of a comic book store.

Everyone’s favorite CIA sniper starts quizzing us about the Mormon faith, carrying on a fan-favorite tradition from the previous novel.

He also mixes in some Dispensationalism, an extreme belief that celebrates the idea of a global holocaust wiping the slate clean and leaving only God’s true believers to rebuild society the RIGHT way.

It’s uh, usually pretty racist.

Meanwhile, Arlene reassures Jill that a woman can do anything she wants, whether it be get married or have babies, or fight the traitors within the government.

Next we meet Captain Hidalgo, who speaks Spanish and whose favorite things are everything that a casual racist from Utah can tell you about Mexico. Hidalgo is the series’ first genuinely chilling character:

Hidalgo interrupts the boring and disturbingly horny DOOM novel with a HARROWING psychological thriller in which his estranged wife aborted their child without his knowledge while he was off fighting the demons who aren’t really demons, mom, they’re just aliens, so you can’t ground me. It’s an exceptionally grimy storyline to suddenly throw into this chastely turgid DOOM adventure. But then again, this is an exceptionally grimy DOOM adventure. Hidalgo’s increasingly deranged narration also never lets us forget how Latino he is, which, again, is exactly as Latino as a casual racist might imagine him.

His very real descent into madness hits a crescendo when he kisses his dead wife’s torso and laughs:

The authors hate women but they sure love teenage girls. And DEAD women! Anyway, this clearly villainous character just becomes part of the team and we never question his allegiance or morality again, because the authors were bad at the job they were hired to do. The novel comes to another complete stop for some bullhorn lip-wiggling, this time delivered by Albert. He spins a chair around and raps with the group about the evils of socialism by pointing to Stalin and Hitler as “perfect models of socialism in practice.”

In reality, both men led violent fascist dictatorships that simply referred to themselves as socialist movements in order to deflect and obstruct, but when you’re a hatchet-dumb weirdo hammering out Mormon porn to your favorite PC game of 1993 you miss out on nuance like that. That is, if you’re not avoiding it intentionally, but we have no reason to believe that Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Lineweaver would do that.

Hitler and the Holocaust have been mentioned in every book of the series!

But you know what NEVER leaves people out to dry? CAPITALISM! It automatically values every man according to the service he renders to his fellow men. Of course, that value will have to be determined based on some kind of currency, subject to fluctuating exchange and inflation rates, the value of that “service” versus other services, how the value of service equates to the overall “value” of the human life providing it, etc. But these petty concerns are no match for Albert’s stone-cold logic. Capitalism is simply the bestest and most fair system ever conceived, and it gave us DOOM, so it’s hard to argue with that. But it also gave us the DOOM novels, and it is IMPOSSIBLE to argue with that. So, Capitalism is undeniably a net bad. There, we finally solved it. Also the book Albert brags about reading twice was written by Ludwig von Mises, an economist who argued that socialism was inherently evil but that fascism was an emergency measure that helped save Europe and had just been wielded improperly in the past. Also, this is the fourth Hitler shout-out in this DOOM novel. Hitler has appeared more times than the cyberdemon. Anyway, here’s another scene of Doomguy’s awesome fury:

Doomguy badassily throws up in his helmet, LIKE A BADASS. Meanwhile, Captain Hidalgo starts thinking about Star Trek, because he’s just as fucking bored as we are:

At the time the book was published, the most recent Star Trek film was Generations, film number 7. So at the time, the authors were calling their shot for the next few Star Trek films, because it’s a book that takes place in the future and sometimes fiction makes predictions that don’t come true. Like the Jaws 17 gag in Back to the Future. That’s fine. It happens. I only highlight it here because Dafydd ab Hugh also wrote several Star Trek novels, and I’m willing to bet he has an unpublished manuscript titled Star Trek Exodus somewhere in his house. We meet some aliens, which the authors can barely muster the energy to describe, so much of the awe-inspiring discovery of First Contact is left entirely to the reader’s imagination. Not Star Trek First Contact, though. That movie hadn’t come out yet.

We can tell we’re in trouble because the authors believe in the galactic sanctity of Mensa, an organization of geniuses that accepts new members based on their IQ, a completely unscientific measure of intelligence created and perpetuated by white supremacists. Doomguy Fun Fact!

But don’t you think for one second that Doomguy took a break from keeping score of everyone’s blasphemy! At least on the alien spaceship things FINALLY get a little less horny:

Back on earth, Jill reminds us what we’re fighting for – a chance to finally rid the planet of all those subhuman homeless people.

Then Jill overhears two OTHER homeless people talking about joining the aliens and she burns them alive while saying a prayer to our heroes as they speed off to spread the word of the angel Moroni to the galaxy.

Meanwhile, back in space, Doomguy’s feelings are hurt:

While you were watching cartoons, Doomguy was busy preparing mentally, physically, and spiritually for his role as cosmic savior. You apologize to his pet skink Sorbo THIS INSTANT. Speaking of apologizing, the authors continue to prove that they only kept Arlene around so that the male characters have someone to condescend to when they’re explaining important concepts:

“If you find my analysis unacceptable, we will say nothing more about it.” Oh hell yeah, Albert, fuck me UP with that message board haughtiness!

And here is where the authors ask us to believe that the central conflict of DOOM is two alien races arguing over the validity of literary criticism.

Nothing makes DOOM cooler than knowing you’re sticking it to those demons for their unfair reviews of genre fiction. Let’s try and frag this nut together! Deconstructionism is kind of a complicated and heady philosophy about the relationship between words and meaning, and how words have no inherent meaning beyond their relationship to other words … uh, I think. I don’t really understand it, and I’m not willing to do any more reading. Like, ever again. But in the world of literary criticism, deconstructionism essentially means taking apart the text and inferring meaning the author didn’t necessarily intend. For instance, one could examine the text of the DOOM series and come away thinking that the authors really hate women. And Arlene specifically calls out science fiction critics, as though she has a bone to pick with them over their reviews of her previous adventures in excruciating horniness. Although I can’t imagine anyone of note actually reviewed these books. Mass market paperbacks like these generally don’t get reviewed, so it seems like ab Hugh and Lineweaver are raging against literary critics on someone else’s behalf. Maybe all the crackpot science fiction writers Doomguy keeps bringing up, because the only thing he’s read more than the Bible is everything in Alex Jones’ bookshelf. Meanwhile, Albert continues wooing Arlene with his terrifying arousal:

“I want to FUCK you Arlene, but like a FATHER!” But he’s not repressed at all. Don’t you even fuckin’ try to say he is.

In the vastness of space, against all odds and with the fate of the universe on their shoulders, Doomguy and friends still find moments of real camaraderie that remind us why the demons aliens are trying so hard to kill them all:

Even Captain Hidalgo takes a break from the psychopathic glee of his wife’s death to become one of the gang:

Yep, definitely no creeping darkness that needs to be examined, just good old-fashioned brotherhood among the stars!

Just wall to wall friendship and good vibes, yessir, nothing weird going on here AT ALL:

Arlene and Albert even get engaged! For some reason! The human race is going to be OK!

“For the last time Arlene, I said I want to fuck you like a FATHER!” The two unleash their passion in an embrace so haunted by the ghosts of future homicide detectives that Arlene should have been blown across the room by psychic energy:

Being married by an officiant who was recently planning to murder his own wife is good luck for any newlywed couple. Fly and Arlene have to make a trip to the alien home world, which will result in an Interstellar-type time dilation that essentially means they will never see Albert again. So Arlene writes him a blazing love letter containing the most passionate words in all of literature:

If you’re marrying someone who has a favorite collectivist, it’s already too late. For you and for humanity. At one point, Doomguy laments not having any books to read on the alien spacecraft, and here is where shit gets real. He wistfully brings up his favorite passage from The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail, except he gets the title slightly wrong and doesn’t mention the author, almost like he doesn’t want any stinkin’ casuals to look it up:

The Camp of the Saints is a NOTORIOUSLY RACIST piece of fiction that helped propagate both the great replacement theory and white genocide, the conspiracy theories at the heart of modern white supremacy!

The Camp of the Saints cannot be misconstrued! It is grotesquely racist on its face! It’s the literary equivalent of a Nazi’s birthday card!

This MIGHT have something to do with why DOOM: Infernal Sky is not currently in print. By this point, you might be saying to yourself, “I thought this was a DOOM book, where’s all the monsters and explosions?” Don’t you worry – the characters are wondering the same thing:

Better keep away from the spider-minds, Fly. We wouldn’t want you to throw up again. Speaking of throwing up, the authors pick up the pace 12 pages later, when Hidalgo fulfills his destiny and is killed in a teleportation accident that transforms him into ManBag:

At least he still has his mouth, so he can smooch his dead wife. Thus ends the most sinister character in butt-pocket literature. When our heroes arrive at the homeworld of the evil aliens, who are totally aliens and definitely NOT Malebolgian slaves of the infernal deep, Doomguy comes across a pair of them knocking space boots and watches for way too long:

Nothing weird going on here! It definitely doesn’t mean anything that Fly executes them by blasting off what he assumes are their genitals!

I’m genuinely terrified to start the next book.

Tom Reimann is the co-founder of Gamefully Unemployed, where he is quietly atoning for purchasing a Dafydd ab Hugh novel twice. Check out their new show BADICAL, if you’re rad enough.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: SEEED, who types their names in all caps as a secret message telling their mom goodnight at the end of an article. Isn’t that super sweet?

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: The Horror Movie Hidden in St. Elmo’s Fire

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Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Punching Day: Carnosaur 2

By now, longtime HOTDOG readers are well acquainted with my dedication to write about the year 1995 specifically. I make no apologies for this fact, because none are required. We don’t ask the spider why she weaves, or the dog why he eats turds from the litter box. You don’t question the sky or its winds, because they’re going to keep blowing. Just as my mind will remain encased in the amber tomb of the year you could buy Batman glasses at McDonald’s.

1995’s Carnosaur 2 is the sequel to 1993’s Carnosaur, an $850,000 movie shotgunned into existence to capitalize on confused audiences trying to buy a ticket to see Jurassic Park. Carnosaur 2 ups the ante by being as close to a scene-to-scene remake of Aliens as you can get without being sued by James Cameron. Incidentally, the Carnosaur franchise was produced by B-movie icon Roger Corman, whom Cameron used to work for as a special effects artist. I have no idea what that means. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.

Carnosaur 2 is a fascinating exercise in blunt force storytelling. It’s like a term paper written by a college freshman who missed most of the semester fighting a public intoxication conviction in Hilton Head, South Carolina. The creative powers behind Carnosaur 2 knew they wanted a sequel to Carnosaur, but they had so little inspiration that the film has nothing to do with the original, and is in fact a remake of a sequel to a different movie.

The film is set in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, which is a real place, sort of. It is a proposed underground storage facility for radioactive material, but it hasn’t actually been built yet. Allegedly. But Carnosaur 2 presupposes that it has. Not only that, but in the process of drilling tunnels deep beneath the earth, the government uncovered dormant dinosaur eggs. Uh, I think. They might have found the eggs in some other project dig site and transported them to Yucca Mountain. I can’t be sure, because I’ve already seen this movie twice, one of those viewings was in the seventh grade, and I’m not watching it a third time.

Anyway, the details don’t really matter, because the point is the dinosaurs have broken loose in Yucca Mountain and eaten absolutely everyone inside. They’ve also completely trashed the place, like the time I tried to install a wall mount for my television.

A badass team of mercenary nuclear technicians arrives, because that is a combination of words Carnosaur 2 boldly wants me to accept. 

But they quickly realize this is no mere equipment malfunction when they encounter evidence of a massacre, the lone survivor of which is a catatonic teen. 

Incidentally, this teen is dressed like a process server trying to sneak up on Eddie Vedder, because it is the year nineteen hundred and ninety five.

But then the team’s badass leader is killed in a sudden dinosaur attack. 

When they attempt to evacuate, their helicopter pilot is ambushed by a velociraptor hand puppet. 

The helicopter crashes and the team is stranded. 

Their boss, a swirling dickweed working for the government, attempts to betray them in order to keep the dinosaurs a secret from the rest of the world. 

But the team has to put aside their differences and escape the facility before radioactive material leaking from all the dinosaur violence causes the mountain to explode. 

But before they’re able to execute their escape plan, angry raptor puppets breach the control room. One badass technician gets snatched through a grate. 

The prickish company man and the perpetually angry badass blow themselves up to avoid being eaten. 

The only survivors are Scummy Teen and Fake Plissken, who is haunted by the loss of his Dead Family. Fake Plissken is played by John Savage, who was in The Deer Hunter, so his hauntedness is authentic, because he has seen what a good movie looks like.

Fake Plissken is captured by the dinosaurs, so Scummy Teen leaves the rescue chopper and goes back down into the facility to save him, only to come face to face with a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The Tyrannosaurus is brought to life by the stunning special effects wizardry of a Robot Wars team that got cut out of their episode because their robot caught fire in the green room.

Scummy Teen carries Fake Plissken to safety, then fights the T-Rex with a power loader. 

Scummy Teen opens a 200-foot mine shaft using a button on the loader and forces the dinosaur into the pit, where it falls to its death. 

“Falls to its death” is a phrase here meaning “it bounces off the ground like a rubber toy, because that’s what it is.”

Scummy Teen and Fake Plissken escape in the helicopter just as the facility explodes, dooming the American southwest for centuries to come.

Does that sound familiar? Specifically, in an “exactly like James Cameron’s Aliens” sort of way? If not, please return to the beginning of the article.

Now, just because it’s a baffling remake of Aliens doesn’t mean Carnosaur 2 is totally without merit. After all, I watched this film, and then decided to watch it again three decades later. I didn’t have to do that. I could have lived the rest of my life instead.

No, something drew me back to this barely-remembered gem of a compromise Blockbuster rental from years past, and I’m glad I chose to revisit it, because it is one of the most earnestly shitty movies I have ever seen. It’s like a piñata full of beetles, or a Sega powered by fear. It has the desire to be fun, but not the ability.

The first character we see is a man in a cowboy hat. He is listening to country western music, because he is wearing a cowboy hat.

He spies a dinosaur and makes a face that can only be described as “Will Ferrell cumming at an improv class.”

Scummy Teen and his friend break into the Yucca Mountain facility using Terminator 2 hacking technology to steal dynamite from a storage room. Just dynamite in old timey crates. Like they’re trying to build a railroad in 1864.

And I really need to take a moment to introduce you to the team of badass repair technicians.

Everyone got a perm the night before. Except for their bald leader, who also has an eyepatch. He must have lost his eye during a particularly deadly repair mission. They look like an arena football team. Each one of them is dressed like a different kind of school shooter. Also, they’re all wearing a lightning bolt patch that looks like the SS insignia. Like, a lot.

John Savage shows up drunk, cooling his forehead with an empty beer can. He wistfully touches a photograph of his family in his locker, so we know that they are Dead.

The team plays an indecipherable rock-paper-scissors game in the helicopter, which is meant to convey how nonchalantly badass they are.

Their headsets are incredible. They look like they’re wearing old office conference phones on their heads. A Magnavox executive has spilled cocaine into one of those.

The control room at the facility looks like the bridge set from a Star Trek CD-ROM game. Jonathan Frakes has given players a side mission from this chair.

The filmmakers realized that having a character chew gum and/or eat candy is a good way to convey that they’re cool and don’t give a hoot. Consequently, four or five different characters are constantly chewing gum. One character is perpetually eating Twizzlers.

Two characters set tripwire traps throughout the facility and end up tripping over them themselves. I can’t stress enough that they are a repair team. These are repair technicians.

Finally, the acting in this film ranges from “poor” to “astonishing.” This is best illustrated by the several moments in which John Savage seems to forget his lines in the middle of saying them. 

Maybe he was thinking about The Deer Hunter.

Tom Reimann is the co-founder of the podcast and streaming network Gamefully Unemployed, where he is busily writing a sequel to The Deer Hunter that is a remake of Jaws 2.

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Doom – Hell on Earth, A Novel 🌭

“Hey kids! Doomguy here. We talk a lot about ripping and tearing in this action-packed computer game, but what I really want to rip and tear are your secular prejudices, to make room for the wisdom of the Church of Latter-Day Saints!”

That passage doesn’t actually appear anywhere in the 1995 novel DOOM: Hell on Earth by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver. But it should be plastered on the cover like a Surgeon General’s Warning. It should be stenciled all over a bulletproof layer of shrink wrap that fully encases this grimy sci-fi paperback like the heat shield on a space shuttle. This book should come with an exit interview by a CIA deprogrammer.

You stalwart HOTDOGGERS may remember that a few months back, I spent entirely too much time picking apart the first book in the DOOM series, which took the popular video game DOOM – an action shooter about a space marine’s violent wind sprint through the armies of Christian Hell – and deleted every word from that description except for “Christian.” The authors boldly transformed the game’s mute protagonist Doomguy, a relentless engine of gratuitous destruction, into Flynn “Fly” Taggart, a repressed ghoul who seamlessly weaves alarming tirades about religion and the military together with ham-handed anti-drug messages that would embarrass McGruff the Crime Dog. He does this while nursing excruciating erections about every single female he encounters, including the dead ones. However, the primary target of his silent turgidity is his BFF and squad mate Arlene Sanders. At least twice every chapter he struggles with the concept of being friends with a woman, a paradox that thunderously confounds him at every turn. He is neither the hero we needed, nor the one we deserved. But he was the one foisted upon every unsuspecting DOOM fan who picked up these books thinking they’d be fun sci-fi horror adventures.

I won’t recap every weirdly Christian moment or uncomfortable burst of sexual frustration from the first novel, Knee Deep in the Dead, because I already did that, and that’s what the internet is for. Suffice to say that the book lays the groundwork for transforming DOOM into something closer to Kirk Cameron’s The Road Warrior than the gonzo heavy metal bone circus that is the video game.

So, when I kicked in Brockway and Seanbaby’s door and threw my badge and gun into their faces, screaming, “Kick me off the force if you must, but I’m going through the rest of these books and there’s not a goddamned thing you can do about it,” I thought I knew what to expect. (Please note that if “Fly” Taggart had been present, he would have immediately chastised me for my blasphemy.) 

But what I didn’t expect – what I could not know – is that the second DOOM novel is a fully unmasked tome of Mormon propaganda. Specifically, a Christo-fascist apocalypse fantasy that dabbles in right wing conspiracy theories and white supremacist talking points. In other words, it’s a page-turner in the worst possible application of that phrase. Where Knee Deep in the Dead was a cheap sci-fi horror novel full of PG-13 horniness and confusing diatribes about Catholic school and whether it is immoral to inject yourself with liquid cocaine to kill scores of monsters more successfully, Hell on Earth is 230 pages of patronizing monologues defending the Mormon church. Occasionally, a monster shows up.

I cannot stress this enough – most of this book is entirely devoted to Mormonism; more specifically, to attempts at convincing the reader that Mormonism is the coolest. It has the exact energy of a youth pastor spinning a chair around backwards to sit down and tell you about how Christ was the original MC. MC JC, probably. This book has real rappin’ Jesus vibes, is my point.

Fly and Arlene crash-land on Earth after the events of the first novel to find the planet overrun by demons that aren’t actually demons but are really aliens pretending to be demons, because that way the authors won’t get in trouble with their parents. The two marines make their way to the Mormon stronghold of Salt Lake City. There, they team up with a sniper named Albert who engages Fly and Arlene in at least fifteen theological debates every chapter; and a fourteen-year-old computer hacker named Jill, who Fly simply cannot wait to fuck. I wish that was a joke. I truly do.

The four are sent on a mission to Los Angeles to do some fucking thing, deactivate a shield I think, so they can escape to Hawaii and do some other fucking thing. Listen, I tried to follow the plot, but the book devotes about ten percent to the actual events of the story and ninety percent to delivering an entry-level course on the core tenets of the Mormon church. They get to LAX and manage to steal a plane, but are forced to separate, leaving Albert and Jill skybound for Hawaii, and Fly and Arlene on the ground trying to figure out what to do next.

It sounds like a bad story that sucks, because it is, and it does. Not even the authors were terribly concerned with the plot. I know this because Fly and Arlene do nothing but quiz each other about the Mormon church for the first sixty pages.

It goes on…

“You see, Fly, after learning everything I could about Mormonism, I became convinced it was bad. And my prejudice is the real problem.”

Nothing says “bad-ass space marine” like scolding your friend for making fun of a make-believe angel.

Although Fly admits to not knowing much about Mormons, he constantly corrects and scolds Arlene about them. Again, even though the book quickly establishes that she has studied the Mormon Church exhaustively, whereas he read a magazine article about them one time.

It continues…

“How dare you call Mormons patriarchal?! I count three women right there! TAKE IT BACK!!”

This is not the last time the book will wistfully invoke the Holocaust.

Suggesting the Jews would’ve “won” the Holocaust if they’d only fought harder is a classic white supremacist argument!

“Bet you can’t name all the books of the Book of Mormon, kids!”

If the first level of DOOM the game had been Doomguy in a deep V-neck t-shirt bragging about how much Bible he’d read, I would have done much better in school.

“They’re not apocalyptic, you ridiculous woman! They’re patriots!” Incidentally, the book almost immediately contradicts this argument when Albert shows up:

“We’re not apocalyptic, we’ve just spent the last several decades preparing for a doomsday war against the vague concept of evil.”

At one point, Fly tucks in for the night by doing some casual reading of the Book of Mormon, just in case you thought I was overstating how much of this sci-fi horror yarn is devoted to teaching adolescent DOOM fans about the benefits of the Church of Latter-Day Saints:

It goes on…

These excerpts may seem tedious, because they are. But they grow even more tiresome when the pair finally meet Albert. The book desperately wants you to think Albert is a stone-cold badass with a heart of gold, the savior of humanity, the kind of person we should all aspire to become. A literal angel, and I’m not making that up.

(Note: This is Doomguy talking.)

How do they convince us Albert is cool? By telling us more than once that he was a decorated sniper in the drug wars.

At one point, Albert admits that he flat-out murdered people for the CIA:

“Headshoot boom, in Jesus’s name, Amen.”

Albert also inherits Fly’s disturbingly chaste horniness and manages to make it even more uncomfortable by immediately fantasizing about impregnating Arlene:

Don’t worry – he pauses this sinister daydream just long enough to admire how sexily Arlene kills monsters:

But if you thought Albert was just some god-bothering burgeoning serial killer, think again! Not only does he constantly fantasize about “taming” Arlene, but he also engages in pages upon pages of bad faith arguments designed to make Arlene’s extremely correct and pointed criticisms seem like “female hysteria.” Because the other thing this book wants you to believe is that women are dumb shrews, and men are level-headed slabs of logic and reason.

I promised you the Holocaust would come up again, and unlike the authors of DOOM: Hell on Earth, I keep my promises. Although I suppose the novel does technically live up to the promise of its title.

Referring to the Holocaust as a “divine test” is also a white supremacist talking point!

Speaking of white supremacy, Albert also makes sure to explain Dispensationalism to his new friends:

In short, Dispensationalists believe that the Bible is literally true, and that a biblical apocalypse must and will occur before the second coming of Christ. Some modern dispensationalists like Ronald Reagan believe that the apocalypse will be nuclear (that’s probably true), but that it will be a good thing, because it will wipe out all the nonbelievers and leave only the pure, noble Christians.

Dispensationalism frequently overlaps with white supremacism!

The book also really wants you to understand that it’s actually heroic and selfless to take multiple wives:

The experience of reading this DOOM novel is one of constantly having to remind yourself that you’re reading a DOOM novel.

I mentioned earlier that a fourteen-year-old computer hacker named Jill is unjustly thrown into the group, and that Fly immediately starts drooling over her in an oblique but no less felonious way. By now you should have learned that while I am prone to exaggeration in every other area of my life, when I’m speaking about the DOOM novels, I speak only the unvarnished truth:

A “foxy little item” who is in the eighth grade.

It continues…

Relentlessly, it continues…

Sweet mormon jesus, it continues…

For the love of everything I have ever cherished, it continues…

The book does great pains to convince us that Jill is an adult, and both demands and deserves to be treated like one.

Hm, I wonder why this book keeps vaguely sexualizing the teenage girl while simultaneously insisting she be considered as adult as her warrior companions?

At least one sect of Mormonism marries underage girls to much older, adult men!

Arlene tries to share the above Doomguy Fun Fact™ with Fly, but is immediately shouted down:

“I’m not even going to address the teen marriage, because what’s really disturbing is your prejudice, Arlene.”

But it’s all okay, because Fly decides he’s the safest person to befriend Jill because his brain will allow him to completely dehumanize her at any moment:

This is actually a powerful argument as to why she shouldn’t be anywhere near you, Fly. This book is so unhinged, I can’t understand how the pages remain glued to the spine. 

I made nearly 100 screen grabs of different excerpts of full-hoot lunacy, which, had I included them all, would’ve ballooned this column to well over 100 pages. So in the interest of saving valuable internet space and not requesting another extension on this deadline, I made the final stretch of this column a potpourri of some of my favorite moments of fig-shitting derangement.

Did you think this DOOM novel was going to contain a mini-rant about how Linus, the Peanuts character, is a filthy Communist? Because I didn’t!

Hey. Hey. Listen – fuck calendars. Wristwatches are where it’s at.

…what.

…what.

Authentic teen speak!

Predicting CompUSA would survive into the 22nd century might be the most irresponsible thing this novel does.

I genuinely do not know whether that’s a typo.

Tom Reimann is the co-founder of the podcast and streaming network Gamefully Unemployed, where he is writing feverish anti-Linus propaganda while smiling like the whale who ate the shrimp library.

…

This article is brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Sean Chase, who holds the record high score in Jehovah’s Witness Quake II.

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Clobberin’ Time! The Marvel OverPower Game Guide

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: The Horny Christian Doom Novelization

Listen – the first thing you need to understand about paperback science fiction and horror novels of the 1990s is that they were all desperately horny. Depressingly horny. Horny in a way that made me ashamed to be a boy going through puberty. And I wasn’t going through it gracefully – I was shambling into my teenage years like a sex werewolf. Indeed, I suspect most of us make the transition into adulthood in a similar fashion.

But even then, I was more than a little uncomfortable every time I ran boner-first into a clumsily graphic sex scene in my latest Aliens adventure, or was whisked away to a dystopian future in which the men were abstract shapes and the women had enormous breasts that were described in painstaking detail. I quickly learned that genre fiction’s three favorite words to assign to female characters – ample, heaving, and spilling – could also be used to describe WWE Superstar Tugboat at a wine tasting.

I’d be lying if I said the DOOM novel was no different. First of all, merely attempting to turn the experience of DOOM into a novel is the act of a psychopath. Any halfway faithful adaptation would just be a rambling scroll of intense violence, like a list of every sitcom catchphrase written in angel’s blood. It would be the internal monologue of a shark. So the fact that someone managed to wring 250 pages out of that should be cause for alarm – either it will be the worst book ever written, or it will actually open a gate to Hell.

But 1995’s DOOM: Knee-Deep in the Dead by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver is toweringly unique among creep fiction, a bold piece of art that dares to ask, “What if the hit computer game about a nameless freight train murdering his way through Hell was both upsettingly horny and weirdly Christian?” Like Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Also, I think those phrases are redundant.

The copy I’d purchased way back during the Clinton years had long ago been lost to whatever Bookmobile donation pile I’d abandoned it to, so in order to revisit it for this column, I had to purchase a new copy. And by “new,” I mean “obviously illegal.” 

This new version (available on Amazon Dot Com!) has the kind of offset type and blurry cover art that can only be achieved by sending low-resolution PDFs to a print-on-demand service. Indeed, according to the sole line of publication data on the back page, my copy was literally printed the day I ordered it, in Las Vegas. Also, it cost $16, roughly three times as much as the copy I bought 27 years ago. Paperback fiction abides by strict codes, one of which reads, “If a book is taller than normal, it is 300% more expensive.” I can only hope the habit I funded with this purchase is a cool one, like cocaine. Or motocross.

I bring all that up to try and set the worst possible stage for you that I can before we embark on this journey. It’s only fair, because the book itself does the exact same thing when you crack open its throbbing cover and are assaulted by this probable felony:

Now, when I read this back in 1995, I didn’t have a smartphone or the internet, so the only way I was going to crack this nut was if I heaved my ass onto my bicycle and pedaled to the library, and guess what the fuck I wasn’t about to do for the dedication page in the DOOM novel. Consequently, I had no idea what this meant, and just assumed these were two people the authors knew personally. This is not the case.

Camille Paglia is a professor at the University of Arts in Philadelphia, but all you really need to know about her is that in 1993, she voiced her support for NAMBLA, and has written extensively about her belief that “male pedophilia is intricately intertwined with the cardinal moments of Western civilization.” And for some reason, the DOOM novel is dedicated to her with lust. Turgid, anxious lust. 

Fred Olen Ray is a film director who, when this novel was published in 1995, had mostly made softcore erotic thrillers. After this book was published, he mostly continued to make softcore erotic thrillers. Dozens of them, in fact.

This is the first fucking page of this book. The first fifteen words are a pledge of allegiance to a sex crime apologist and a Skinemax all-star. Buying it has almost certainly earned me a federal wiretap. Let’s continue wading knee-deep into the dead and see what else lies in wait for us.

We’re introduced to Marine Corporal Flynn “Fly” Taggart, a name invented by an adult in G.I. Joe pajamas. Fly is the main character – the “Doomguy” from the video game. He opens the story by telling us about a recent mission in a fictional Middle Eastern country, which means there’s no excuse for this passage:

The “torn hymen” is not a real place. These two daring authors just decided they wanted to open their book with that image, right after lustily dedicating the story to their favorite NAMBLA booster. 

Fly is a classic character – a proud Marine who doesn’t do drugs and practically seethes with friend-zoned boneration at his fellow soldier Arlene Sanders. Fly is such a proud Marine, in fact, that he devotes three paragraphs to a deranged rant about his devotion to the Corps like a kid trying to argue Santa Claus into existence:

He continues…

… and continues more…

See, now we’re getting close to what a DOOM novel should be, which is “incoherent lip-wiggling.” And there are exactly two moments in this DOOM novel that shine so brilliantly they nearly bathe the sun itself in gold:

Yes! Yes!

That’s some top-shelf gibberhooting. If DOOM: Knee-Deep in the Dead had been 250 pages of this, it would’ve won the Pulitzer Prize and been elected president, and all other books would have been destroyed for their inferiority.

But sadly, it was not to be. Instead, Fly spends most of the book talking about his female squadmates like the goddamn Zodiac killer:

It’s strange that the authors want me to know Arlene is hot, but not too hot. Like they’re trying to convince me that they, personally, have a shot with this make-believe person they’ve created. But don’t worry – although most of Fly’s lurking horniness is focused on Arlene, he does find time to spread it out to the only other woman we meet. Incidentally, she is a corpse, though “still cute,” when we meet her:

With “Dude” Dardier out of the way, Fly can spend the rest of the book leering at Arlene exclusively. He’s a one-woman guy, just like the authors, who were only able to include a second female character if she were stone fucking dead.

The book nearly collapses under its own freewheeling horniness at one point, when Fly briefly pauses in the middle of a medical emergency to drool over Arlene’s tits:

Her amble breasts. The authors have become so horny they have forgotten one of the most important words in the pantheon of horny fiction. 

It all leads up to an extremely chaste kiss that was meant to be steamy but comes across as deranged because Fly can’t wrap his mind around having a platonic female friend:

But just in case you thought Fly was some kind of hatchet-faced dweeb, think again, buster. He’s such a glistening fuck horse that Arlene can’t take her eyes off him. And, ok, yes, he is also a dweeb. Such a dweeb that he cannot bear to be seen naked:

You would be forgiven for expecting Fly – the Doomguy himself – to be cool and badass, and not a weirdly repressed ghoul who eye-bangs every woman he encounters while hiding his own shame like a kid who just got pantsed at the bowling alley. 

Not only is he a weird, repressed ghoul, but he is technically the most repressed ghoul in the entire galaxy, because this story takes place in space. For instance, the authors thread a subtle anti-drug message throughout the book by casting Fly as a passive aggressive version of McGruff the Crime Dog:

After bragging about getting grease-butter deep in an old-movie orgy, Fly confesses to the time he got hopped up on the magic of Halloween:

He’s so straight edge he even has a problem with demon massacre-enhancing drugs:

Synthetic adrenaline, not even once:

Now, the Doomguy from the video game has eaten so much bath salts that he qualifies as a controlled substance. He doesn’t do drugs because they stopped working on him. Fly, on the other hand, is a nerd who is scared of needles and burns cocaine fields for the CIA. Cool. That’s much better. Having two guys write this book really paid off.

There’s two important reveals in this passage. One, that Fly – and, by extension, the authors – thinks shitty jokes are funny. “Take my name to heart and become a Human Fly”? How dare you. If a child told that joke at a talent show, you would boo that child. You’d have to.

Two, Fly – and, by extension, the authors – hates sicko nightclubs. The tunnel in question in that passage is a normal tunnel, with flickering lights. So the word “sicko” is just describing how Fly feels about nightclubs. Which makes sense, because he – and, by extension, the authors – is a huge nerd.

“The big silly got itself stuck,” says the Hell marine about his 19,721st kill.

Oh, thank fuck. For a second I thought he was serious about the pear tree. What a joke! What a perfectly timed explanation for that joke!

This isn’t really a joke, unless you count the authors’ genuine belief that the word “Indian” is what is problematic about that phrase.

When you’re MADLibbing an alien planet name, you can pick anything. Xorblop, Zantagg IV, whatever. To let your mind wander and have it land directly on the planet “Pornos” is as psychologically revealing as the phrase “Native American giver.”

And just in case you thought jarheads were muscle-bound jocks who think books are a thing you knock out of a dweeb’s hands – which is an experience the authors definitely had, along with several kids who bought this terrible DOOM novel – Fly and Arlene make book jokes. Because they’re strong and cool and they read:

Fly is a genius, instantly and perfectly adopting new vocabulary. “This situation has got eldritch… am I saying that right? Elll-der-itch? Right, all that elstridge is coming out my ass.”

But don’t worry – Fly’s bizarre repression still manages to shine through all these zingers thanks to disturbing acts of borderline sexual violence!

“My eldritch was rock hard, but from excitement, not for his still cute buttless corpse, which making love to would be a cosmic sin. ‘Just say no to sex with this demon, Arlene.’ I told my amble-chested pal. In Jesus Christ’s name, Amen.”

The authors seem to be doing their best to get me to stop reading this book, which is why they thoughtfully throw in a few easter eggs for fans of the game, AKA the only people who would ever purchase a DOOM novel in 1995.

Haha, what a gorm! What a useless, fleshy gorm!

That line is a reference to a cheat code in the game. But you’d probably never be able to tell, because it’s so badass.

There aren’t actually any dick levers in the game. But there should be. And hey! Another opportunity for barely restrained horniness to burst back into the story like a loose circus bear.

At one point, the authors slap the pause button on the action to do some quick swastika rehabilitation:

The marines continue their desperate speculation…

The only people who would include this in a DOOM novel are people trying to convince you it’s okay to own shit with swastikas on it. 

This passage also contains the most unexpected reveal of the entire novel – Fly is extremely Christian, and is essentially trying to convert Arlene. In other words, the authors are extremely Christian. Or, at least, they’re pushing an extremely Christian worldview. Also, they notably change the monsters from literal Hell demons to aliens pretending to be Hell demons. Why would aliens pretend to be demons? To scare Earthlings. It’s genius. Also, writing a book about aliens won’t upset Jesus.

Fly constantly mentions going to Catholic school as a kid, and as the novel progresses he begins to slip more and more into it until he is all but quoting scripture. In this novel, Doomguy is a cool youth pastor who is really good at sports and doesn’t do drugs and reads awesome books, and is desperately, ragingly horny inside his mind at all times:

“We might as well play Adam and Eve and… name all the beasts,” is the hardest you can possibly bail on a pickup line. It’s like saying, “We should get out of these wet clothes and… then meet back here from the separate rooms we went to, in Jesus Christ’s name, Amen.”

This is what world-class world-building looks like.

Reminder – this “not huge fan” of morbid jokes fired a machine gun into a monster’s anus and called it a rectal suppository. I suppose if he’d called it a Christ Blast or The Last Suppository, it would’ve been in poor taste.

In the end, Fly’s god-bothering horniness turns Arlene into a believer:

I cannot believe this is the DOOM novel. Two dudes got together and turned DOOM into a bizarre Christian action movie telling kids not to do drugs. It’s like a Left Behind novel dictated by Mr. T, except it sucks. 

And it’s weirdly horny, did I mention that? Like, weirdly horny. Kids probably shouldn’t read this. I definitely shouldn’t have.

Tom Reimann is the co-founder of the podcast and streaming network Gamefully Unemployed, where he is busy turning Quake into an erotic VeggieTales novella.